Escaping Reality
by Zerosixnine2011
Summary: Enter Mr. Langham, a small town USA convenience store clerk who's just getting started in life until a wierd man in robes walks in the door! What happens when these two have a debate on war and the stranger wins the war of words? Follow along and find out! Eventual OCx?, other pairings possible! Still in development! Begins @ Mizuki's death. Rated M for possible later violence.


_**As for the usual, I just want to say that I do not own Naruto, or any other copyrighted ideas I may wind up using. Because Naruto with a zanpakutou and vampire abilities that border on godlike would be overpowered...right?**_

"How's everything goin'?"

That's the line most people heard as they walked into the local convenience store. Hell, it's the one I usually could say whether I was dead ass tired or fresh out of bed. What else was I supposed to say? Everything else just sounded too much like I was just doing nothing more than a job. Now, don't get me wrong when I say that. I do love my job. Being a clerk on the overnight shift lets me interact with all sorts of people throughout the night. You never know what's going to walk through that door next.

But, on the other hand...it's still a job. Still working a 10 - 6 shift all the time. Still spending every night away from the wife. Always sleeping on different schedules. Yeah, there's plenty of reasons to hate working in a place like this. But it's still my job, and I do my damnedest to make the most of it. It was a night kind of like this one, just another night of freezing my ass off in the cooler trying to stock up on alcohol for everyone else and keeping tabs on the five finger thieves that walk through the door, that something really strange happened.

But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me give you a little bit of background on me.

My name's John Langham. I'm 22 years old, and just starting on the road of life. I have a car (that I love almost as much as my wife, though I'll never tell her that), a wife at home that loves me...most days, and a child on the way that I cannot WAIT for. Hell, some days that little girl is the only thing that keeps me going.

Life for me has been strange since day one. When I was a kid, I was always training in Karate and just working out physically as much as possible. My friends at school at the time needed protection, being the nerds of the class, and I felt it was my responsibility to play protector. Even after high school, this habit of training my body to its peak has persisted.

Apparently, it's enabled me to do things most people shouldn't. For instance, I can run faster than anybody I've ever met. Hell, I clocked myself with my friend driving a car beside me going 35 MPH! I can jump up and land on a single story house's roof with no issues, and I can almost always see better in the dark than the people around me. Kinda like Superman, without all the abilities to fly. Though I'm starting to wonder if I'm going to get that too...

Here in the last few years, the few people that know me well enough have taken to calling me Super John for the things that I can do.

Now I just feel like a Super Joke.

The abnormalities are getting worse every year. Hell, just this last year, I went to go punch a brick wall, thinking...nothing really, I was kind of mad at the moment, and I BROKE IT! I'm talking re-bar reinforced brick walling, and it broke like a 2 by 4! Yeah...trying to explain to the police that I was testing some directed homemade breaching C-4 was a fun experience. I still think the military is watching me after that incident. Then again, they've never really stopped watching me. Ever since the first time I used my abilities for something out of the ordinary, they've been watching me, waiting for me to slip up and let them see something proving that I'm different than most people. They used the incident with the wall to keep a near constant 24 hour watch on me. Something about that formula for breaching C-4 not being available to the public.

Hard to believe since I wound up finding one shortly after the police left that day online...

Anyways, moving on.

It was just another night at the convenience store when I had a real strange one walk in. He was dressed in what looked to be something similar to some amazingly designed bath robes. They were silky in appearance, and seemed to almost...glow? Yeah, that's right. Glow. You know, G-L-O-W. Not to mention the guy had a hood on too, though I could see a bit of bright white hair sticking out from underneath it.

Anyways, he walked through the store, just looking up and down the aisles (I couldn't really tell, considering his head never moved), and within about 10 minutes, wound up being at the register. "Hey there, did you find everything alright?", I asked as I began to ring up the can of green tea and bottle of sake he found in the back part of the store in the oriental section.

"Everything's been alright for years, but thank you for asking anyways.", the man responded in a voice that sounded worn out, but wizened by many years of being alive. The voice of his struck a note in me, and I'm not really sure why, but I wasn't going to question it.

"I can understand that," I replied without missing a beat. "But at the same time, at least it's better calm then, say, in the middle of a war, right?", was the next sentence out of my mouth.

Right here was when things got incredibly weird.

The man quickly looked up at me, and I jumped back away from the counter at what I saw. His eyes were white with purple rings all throughout them. And I don't mean just like a set of contacts. It looked like they were all the way out to the edges of his eyes. I could feel the man's stare on me, even as I started walking back to the counter from my moment of freak out.

"You can never know how nice peace is without being at war, so wouldn't you say they both have their reasons for existing?", he casually asked as I finished ringing up his items. I looked back at him with a contemplative look in my eyes, still slightly unnerved.

"Yes, that's true. I suppose that without war, people could never truly understand the value of peace. I just hope I never experience war on my own homeland, though I wish I could understand that pain. I've experienced it in someone else's home, and I hope that one day I can understand what I must have put other people through. It must have been a horrible experience."

"How would you like to find out?" He asked as if he was asking what the weather was going to be tomorrow.

I stared in shock at the man, then that shock quickly turned to anger. I made to reach under the counter as I asked the man, "Was that a threat sir?" Right as I wrapped my hand around the bat I kept under the counter, I made to pull up the weapon defensively, and immediately noticed something wrong. I couldn't move my hand. It was like it was stuck to the bat like glue, and the bat felt like it was bolted to the floor. It was only after that that I felt this...pressure, is the only way I can describe it. It was like having multiple versions of myself all putting their weight on my legs. It was hard to stand. Hell, it was hard to breathe. "What the hell...", I mumbled to myself as I tried yet again to move.

"There's no need for that. I was just asking a simple question. Would. You. Like. To. Find. Out?" The slowly said, enunciating with high clarity every single word of the last sentence. Looking back up at him, I felt a sort of...presence, coming off of him. Like authority with the power to back up his words.

After thinking carefully, I answered, "Yes, I would. If for no other reason than to maybe save those I find precious to me, and keep them from experiencing the horrors of war." While giving my response, I noticed I was able to move more and more as the seconds ticked by.

The man seemed to notice me moving, and gained a slightly shocked expression. "To think, there's someone in this day and age with the ability to use chakra...it's amazing."

I simply looked at the man like he had grown a second head, asking the question that was bouncing around my head.

"Who are you?"

The next thing I know, I hear a rumbling sound as the power begins to flicker out. An ethereal purple glow begins to illuminate the store, and from beside the man, a massive demon head appeared out of the ground with the same strange eyes as the man. It must have been 7 foot tall, and it was just the head! I looked back at the man in awe, and noticed I could see his face for the first time. It was aged, but not with years, with experience instead.

"I am a man of many names, but one of my personal favorite titles...is Rikudou Sennin.", he said with a small quirk of a smile on his face. After he uttered those words, the head opened its mouth, and a tongue shot out, grabbing me by the neck. I quickly grabbed onto it, trying to pull it away from me, but it felt like all my strength had been drained from me. I looked around in fear, trying to find something, anything, to get this...tongue...away from my neck.

Huh, never thought I'd find myself saying those words.

After struggling for a few more seconds, I gave up trying to pull it off for a moment and just stared at the man. The presence this man had before was gone, and in its place was something much worse...I literally felt like this man had killed me in 100 different ways and brought me back to life. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see straight, I couldn't swallow...hell, I couldn't even piss my pants out of fear that this man would actually kill me.

"Now you're going to get your wish. You will experience war in your homeland, but with a twist...it's not your homeland. At least, not in the sense that you know.", the man said cryptically. I stared at him in a mixture of fear and confusion before the tongue yanked me into the demon head's mouth faster than I could blink, and began to close on me. The last thing I saw before the mouth closed was the man giving me a full-blown smile and mouthing the words, "Hope you're a fast learner!"

Then it all went black.

_**Hey everyone, Zero here! I'm kind of new at this whole self insertion role, so I'm going to give this a shot. Also, on a sidenote, I TOTALLY do not have any idea where this is going to go. So please, don't bombard me with PMs asking what my plans are. Take what you see for granted, and allow your imagination to run free. That's what I'll be doing here. So be prepared for idiocy, lunacy, and overall craziness...with just a small dash of seriousness added, just for that fulfilling flavor!**_

_**In any case, leave any ideas or tips in a pm or review, I'll be checking them every 2-3 days when I get time. If you're interested in seeing where this goes, let me know by leaving a note somewhere! Every little bit is more motivation to keep going! Thanks again!**_

_**EDIT: I came back to fix a few things, thanks again to Zerojackson for the plotline ideas and spotting the missing pieces of the introductory puzzle!**_


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